Lorenzo W. Milam - Sex and Broadcasting: A Handbook on Starting a Radio Station for the Community

Copyright

Copyright 1988 by Lorenzo W. Milam

All rights reserved.

Bibliographical Note

This Dover edition, first published in 2017, is an unabridged republication of the fourth edition of the work, published as The Original Sex and Broadcasting: A Handbook on Starting a Radio Station for the Community by Mho & Mho Works, San Diego, in 1988. [First publication: 1971]

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Milam, Lorenzo W, author.

Title: Sex and broadcasting : a handbook on starting a radio station for the community / Lorenzo W. Milam ; introduction by Thomas J. Thomas.

Description: Mineola, New York : Dover Publications, Inc., 2017.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016054224| ISBN 9780486814490 | ISBN 0486814491

Subjects: LCSH: Radio broadcastingUnited States. | Radio programsUnited States. | Radio stationsUnited States.

Classification: LCC HE8698 .M53 2017 | DDC 384.54068/1dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016054224

Manufactured in the United States by LSC Communications

81449101 2017

www.doverpublications.com

To put out a fully revised Fourth Edition of Sex and Broadcasting requires that we include the immense technical changes that have occurred in the past ten years: the invasion of cable radio and television; the now common home video recorder; the plethora of disks and tapes (both audio and visual); the bastard step-brother of community radio, CB; three-and-a-half million satellite dishes sprouting in backyards, great aluminum psilocybin mushrooms of knowledge and communication. The things we tried to do in 1965 or 1975 (haltingly, with minimal budget) being done on satellite and cable channels channels that scarcely existed back then: C-SPAN, CNN, the Discovery channel, Z, Bravo, Nickelodeon, A&E, and PBS for video; National Public Radio and Pacifica network programs and the great sound services of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation on Anik-D for audio.

Radio and radio law and radio practice seemed so much more direct in the old days. Information about the Federal Communications Commission was the privilege of the few mostly broadcasters and their attorneys. The outsiders like us who bothered to study and learn the truth could be well rewarded with results. The FCC was slow and stupid, a great slobbering beast there at the edge of the Potomac. With certain goads and craftiness, one could move the monster into a spasm of action, preferably in the right direction. This was one of the lessons of Sex and Broadcasting, editions One, Two, and Three.

Nowadays, under the rubric of deregulation, the FCC has emerged as an earlier incarnation: a clone of the Federal Radio Commission. The FRC was the immediate predecesor to the FCC, and following John L. OSullivans dicta that The best government is that which governs least, managed, singlehandedly, to shove American radio in to a Media Dark Age which lasted well into our own time. The regulators were owned by the industries they were created to regulate AT&T ran the Common Carrier Bureau, the Broadcast Bureau was the baliwick of the commercial broadcasters, and the Chairman and most of the FCC commissioners were content to live in tiny, dark holes namely, the back pockets of ABC, CBS, and NBC, and the other networks. Like some mythic southern family, all of them revelled in their incest, but it was deadly for the lifeblood of American free speech. In other countries, it would be known as Socialism for the rich and powerful; in the United States, it was called Good Business Practice.

I am happy to report that a natural antipathy to work, as well as a premature dotage, has spared me the hard job of rewriting Sex and Broadcasting. Thus, what you have in your hands is mostly a reprint of the Third Edition. In fairness to my lassitudinous selfI should point out that a great deal of this present edition is not ancient history. So much of what I wrote and what people seem to remember with fondness (as I do myself) is concerned with the passion of broadcasting. This, indeed, is the source of its ambivalent and somewhat garish title.

As well, there are still all those valid ideas for improving radio programming with minimum budget and primitive tools. In fact, these may be more important than ever with the proliferation of public broadcast outlets which have embarked on a slavish aping of commercial radio stations (even to the point of being lead by the ratings rather than by ideals of great and good radio). The humble, rough-around-the-edges community radio station a model for freedom of speech, and freedom for all of us to be involved still deserves our love and our support.

Nabokov once claimed that each of us, as humans, are Double Monsters, joined at the hip of time. As such, we are remiss if we attempt to exorcise, or even deny, the passion-clogged, foolish and embarrassing parts of our previous lives. Except for a few typographical emendations, and the omission of one or two paragraphs (not my own) that might be grievously embarrassing to their previous owners Sex and Broadcasting 1975 stands as it was. Readers will quickly spot the anarchisms: telephone numbers, addresses, names, directions, forms, foundations, stations, friends, enemies, piques, cholers and flatulent passions that no longer parse, much less exist. The ideas born out of those heady days shall remain, uncensored by me, their loving and deranged father. They are part of our set back when we felt we could so easily burn a change into the fundament of American communications.

God grant our friends, relatives, loves, and gods a chance to experience such rich forgiveness.

Lorenzo W. Milam
Ulan-Bator
January, 1988

What a blabby night I made of it . I painted one of those lurid, dramatic pictures which, nevertheless, was true. And I told them the exact how-to-do-it. I told them how to get money for it; I told them about the army of people we knew in engineering and law and other existing radio stations who could share with them the knowledge . I told them about frequency searches, and how to find the old, used equipment, and where to put their antenna. I gave them do-it-yourself radio lecture #1, complete with jokes, dramatic memories, and stories about busts and bombings .

I waggled my head around, got that light in my eyes when I was talking about real radio alternatives, that mad-light of the radio crazies.

Lorenzo Milam

Sex and Broadcasting is a special telling of the old exact how-to-do-it: the full tilt, Do-It-Yourself Radio Lecture Number One. Circa 1974.

The book is, in many respects, an artifact of an erafor community radio and the country itselfthat now is past. Perusing its pages is a bit like leafing through an old copy of The Whole Earth Catalogue, or, for those of us who lived these stories, perhaps more like a school yearbook. Now a decade old, most of the hard-core practical information is seriously out-of-date. And truth be told, a lot of it never worked all that well, anyway.

But Milams Radio Lecture Number One, babbly, dramatic and all the rest, was never really about how-to-do-it and neither is this book. His genius was and is the passion and excitement and vitality of radio pushed well beyond the limits of practicality, the tumbling transmission of ideas, musics and emotions that can be driven by the power of peoples need to communicate and the energy that is captured when a channel of true connection is created within a community.